Working From Home for the Next 10 Years: A List of Likely Possibilities Experts Foresee Emerging as a Result
This is an insightful read on what working from home might lead to throughout the 2020s, something that was occasioned by the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Chris Herd @chris_herd (Twitter) Founder and CEO @FirstbaseHQ (Twitter) put the following long thread on Twitter two days ago, where he predicted a raft of possibilities likely to emerge from working at home environment. It is a lengthy read but definitely worth every of your minute spent.
2. Asynchronous Work: Offices are instantaneous gratification distraction factories where synchronous work makes it impossible to get stuff done. Tools that enable asynchronous work are the most important thing globally remote teams need. A lot of startups will try to tackle this.
3. Hobbie Renaissance: Remote working will lead to a rise in people participating in hobbies and activities which link them to people in their local community. This will lead to deeper, more meaningful relationships which overcome societal issues of loneliness and isolation.
4. Rural Living: World-class people will move to smaller cities, have a lower cost of living & higher quality of life. These regions must innovate quickly to attract that wealth. Better schools, faster internet connections are a must.
5. Constant Presence: Asynchronous work lets you have the issolation to do deep work but it's not always required Communication solutions which enable presence, like an open mic while gaming, will become more compelling.
6. Bad Tech: Remote will grow so popular so quickly that it will attract people who have no interest in it other than greed.Their lack of understanding of remote work will lead to them replicating the bad parts of office working remotely.
7. Remote Rejection: Certain demographics and generations will reject the transition. Their benefit – that everyone in the office is like them and it's easier for them to progress – will be their reason. Companies that don't transition will be left behind.
8. Diversity & Inclusion: The most diverse and inclusive teams in history will emerge rapidly. Companies who embrace it have a first-mover advantage to attract great talent globally. Companies who don't will lose their best people to their biggest competitors.
9. Output Focus: Time will be replaced as the main KPI for judging performance by productivity and output. Great workers will be the ones who deliver what they promise consistently. Advancement decisions will be decided by capability rather than who you drink beer with after work.
10. Car Households: The rise of remote will have tremendous indirect benefits towards slashing pollution. Families will benefit from only needing one car slashing cost of living, potentially cutting commuting a lot.
11. Private Equity: The hottest trend of the next decade for private equity will see them purchase companies and make them remote-first. The cost saving in real-estate at scale will be eye-watering. The productivity gains will be the final nail in the coffin for the office.
12. The Death of Coworking: The last recession was the beginning of the end for bespoke vanity office. The next recession will spell the same thing for co-working spaces The rise of remote will mean a majority of the 255m desk jobs globally are remote by 2029.
13. Talent Wars: Remote work is the perk that is most sought after by workers globally. This will only mean Remote-first companies will disrupt every incumbent who doesn't/isn't able to make that transition.
14. Written Communication: The most important skill for workers to cultivate. Reading and understanding to be key. Problems arising from misunderstanding emanating from written communication will become a big issue.
15. Working Too Much: Companies worry that the workers won't work enough when operating remotely. The opposite will be true and become a big problem. Remote workers burning out because they work too much will have to be addressed.
16. Distraction Avoidance: The home office will skyrocket in popularity. A space at home to work from will become a necessity. There will be an explosion of people purchasing standalone units for their backyards for this purpose.
17. Global Citizens: Individuals with no national attachment will become ubiquitous. Challenges of paying people across the border due to compliance and legal issues, will slowly fade away as the world becomes more borderless.
18. Retreat Destinations: Global hubs will pop-up that cater to remote teams getaways. Resort-like escapes with a deep focus on team building, collaboration, planning, and efficiency. Hotels with facilitators /coaches who assist teams for the duration will also crop up.
19. Life-Work Balance: The rise of remote will lead to people re-prioritizing what is important to them. Organizing your work around your life will be the first noticeable switch. People realizing there is more than there is job will lead to deeper purpose in other areas.
20. Fractional Ownership: Remote work will make advancement less important/more difficult. Rather than reward being a better title, fractional ownership could enable workers to be more easily rewarded with ownership of their companies. This will make the market for equity more liquid.
21. 'Bullshit' Tasks: The need to pad out your 8-hour day will evaporate, replaced by clear tasks and responsibilities. Workers will do what needs to be done rather than wasting their time trying to look busy as the rest of the office staffs.
22. Decentralized Opportunity: Remote work will do more for inequality than anything in history. Workers everywhere will find the best, highest paying job. The fear that this will depreciate wages will be unfounded as companies will need more talent than exists.
23. Accessible Jobs: Remote work will make work more accessible than it has ever been. Nothing will stop workers getting the job they deserve because there will be no obstacles in their way.
24. Remote Tools: Companies operating remotely now will have created tools every remote team on the planet needs. @Zapier, @Gitlab, @GitHub, @FirstbaseHQ will spawn mafias who take these internal tools and create startups around them. Several $Billion startups to emerge this way.
25. Multiple Jobs: The gig/freelancer economy will evolve. Remote work allows workers to have multiple employers. The difference in terms of reliability and consistency will be huge, eradicating doubt, lead to better conditions for workers.
26. Remote Jobs: There won't be enough remote jobs for at least the next 5 years. World-class people will drive the change. They will demand more remote opportunities and realize the influence they have to make their companies give it to them.
27. Remote Infrastructure: The focus on the 'sexy' won't change any time soon. There is a missing half of remote work that's neglected because it's difficult, boring, and 'unsexy'. It will be the most critical. Until that's solved remote teams won't scale globally easily.
28. Social Contact: Loneliness, disconnection are neither improved or worsened by remote work. A number of people's main social contact comes at work, with people being decided by their bosses hiring policy. Remote work must lead to deeper more meaningful relationships with friends/family.
29. Health & Wellbeing: A lack of commute will give workers 25 extra days a year to do other things. Workers will exploit the freedom they have to organize things more freely in their day. Afternoon runs, morning meditation, two things a lot of people rarely do.
30. UI-less Tech: Friction while working remotely is one of the biggest communication problems for remote. Instant communication which isn’t distracting, disrupting or about surveillance will be super-important.
31. Death of HQ: The office is dead but offices will persist. They’ll be used less frequently then hardly at all. Co-working, subscription clubs, will emerge that let workers who prefer that mode of work to operate from there.
32. City Unbundling: The allure of the city has been eroded by technology. You can easily spend time there without living there. Cost of living has made them irrational. Modern time-shares for city living, city services being distributed are inevitable in.
33. Vertical Tools: @NotionHQ, @LoomHQ, @zoom_us etc. are incredible horizontal products that do nearly anything. Vertical products that do one thing, operating around a constraint that looks like a feature, will explode to prominence.
34. Presence: Tools that provide an estimate of when you should expect a response will become big. These will measure the tasks your team are doing and use this to set expectations, allowing teams to escalate more easily when necessary.
35. Remote Living: Work from anywhere RVs will become huge business. Associated business parks and services will spring up. This will happen even more rapidly as self-driving tech emerges.
36. WFH Dominance: The majority of workers will work from home a majority of the time by the end of this decade. Employers will be responsible for ensuring the health and safety of teams operating at home.
37. WFH Experience: offices have emerged to provide incredible experiences inside some companies. Lunches, laundrettes, child care Companies will differentiate in this domain rapidly. The remote culture and experience a company offers will be a massive attraction for workers.
38. Robotic Process Automation: RPA will transform work for individuals. No-code tools that enable workers to built bots that automate menial parts of their roles will be huge.
39. Relationships Re-imagined: Closest social contact decided by your boss’s HR policies is bad. It leads to shallow superficial relationships because the only thing you have in common is your employers bottomline. Tools that inspire deeper new & existing relationships will be huge.
40. Payment Preferences: Workers will have the power to shift the currency they receive payment in at the touch of a button Fractional ownership of their company over salary will become an option too.
42. Venture Collectives: Communities of founders, makers and operators will find one another and build tools to solve the problems they are facing. These teams will be uniquely placed to do this as they’ll be collections of people operating at the cutting edge of innovation.
43. E-founders: Digital CEOs of companies will emerge in the next 3 years, a unicorn within 5, likely a social network.
44. Remote Visa: Small nations coming together in order to attract remote workers at different stages of the year. Huge opportunity to synchronise education to enable families to be more fluid in their locations
45. Co-working Homes: Micro co-working spaces on every street, a decentralized WeWork that comes with all the requisite amenities.
46. Remote Retreats: Purpose-built destinations that allow for entire companies to fly into a campus for a synchronous week. Likely staffed with facilitators and educators who train staff of how to maximize effectiveness.
47. Democratize Coaching: Everyone who want to, will have access to a coach. This will help people perform and optimize. Companies will provide these to teams, remote-focussed coaches will be incredible.
48. Hybrid Implossion: The bad thing about two worlds working alongside is because it dilutes the benefits of remote or office work. The maximisations of the negatives of each mode will mean that hybrid companies are the least successful of the 3 options: remote, office, hybrid.
49. Synchronous Rejection: For too long we’ve accepted disruption and distraction as an excuse for collaboration and communication. Most knowledge working jobs don’t have to be synchronous, productivity is detrimentally affected when they are.
50. Tool Experts: VP of Notion, Head of Figma, Firstbase Manager. The tools needed to effectively work remotely will lead to deep specialists inside organization who optimize the use of that product for that teams needs.
51. Meetings Death: Wasting two hours travelling to a meeting will end. The benefits of in-person are eroded by the benefits you get of not travelling. Conferences and quarterly networking events will becomes more important for cultivating in-person relationships
52. Happier People: Modern office working has led to the deepening of major societal issues. People will find meaning alongside work by depending on the social relationships of work far less.
53. Hyper-Turnover: We are about to live through the highest period of turnover between companies in history. Workers will reorganize rapidly, choosing the workplace that suits their working style best.
54. Quality of Life: Disposable income will increase. It no longer makes sense to live in a high-cost of living city with a reliatively low quality of life. People will live close enough to cities to go into them 1-3 times a month. Rapid mass transit becomes very important.
Compiled by 254 NewsDay.